When millions of people come to Los Angeles for the World Cup, Olympics and Paralympics, their first taste of the city will probably be the infuriating congestion of LAX. Now, do we want to treat our guests — and ultimately ourselves — to an even worse welcome: a half-finished, $1.5-billion roadway project at LAX that will only end up making traffic more gridlocked?
Whether you are crawling along in holiday traffic — achingly close to the terminal just hoping you’ll make the flight — or are making your daily commute to work at the airport and the many businesses that surround it, the approach roads to LAX are already one of Angelenos’ least favorite places. Now, LAX’s board has approved what they call a “modernization” project to reroute and expand the roads leading into the airport’s infamous “horseshoe.” This project isn’t scheduled to be completed before the 2028 Olympics. And what’s more, it won’t fix traffic at the airport — it will only make it worse.
Why? For one, any short-term travel-time improvements won’t last. Most drivers use Google Maps and Waze to algorithmically navigate shifts in traffic when heading to the airport. So even if a new ramp is temporarily faster, it will soon fill up again as traffic is directed there and as drivers gain familiarity with the routing. The idea that new lanes quickly become congested again as they draw in drivers from other routes, times of day and modes of travel is what planners call “induced demand.” This same thing happened in 2014, when authorities widened the 405: traffic got worse within just nine months as people shifted their travel onto the new lanes.
Moreover, there is still only so much curb and road space along the LAX horseshoe. Imagine using a wider funnel to fill the same bottle. That’s what will happen with these new roadways: pushing more cars into the same bottleneck.
The project’s own estimates forecast almost 41,000 new miles of vehicle travel each day once complete. And its environmental review concludes that the new traffic and emissions are a “significant and unavoidable impact” with “no feasible mitigation measures.”
Spare a thought here for residents of Westchester, Inglewood and El Segundo. They already live with cut-through traffic and the dangerous crashes and pollution this traffic causes. This project threatens to make all of that worse, risking lives and livelihoods for not just the immediate neighborhoods but the nearly 1 million people living within seven miles of LAX. It’s no wonder residents continue to organize against the plan.
The project was originally part of a larger, long-discussed expansion of the airport, formally announced in 2019 with the initial aim of adding two new terminals in time for the Olympics. But with passenger counts still down after the COVID-19 pandemic, LAX authorities scuttled the terminal expansions. And yet, the roadway plan marches on, despite having less traffic demand than before and no new terminals to serve. With much of its justification dead, it has become a “zombie project.”
This is all the more disappointing after LAX has done so much to open the airport to options other than private cars. Despite continued delays in its opening, the Automated People Mover promises to connect the terminals to each other, to rental car facilities and to drop-off points outside the horseshoe. Metro recently opened the beautiful LAX/Metro Transit Center, a rail station and bus hub at 96th Street and Aviation Boulevard at the end of the coming People Mover, finally allowing people to take transit between LAX and Metro’s growing network.
Inside the horseshoe, LAX reserved the lower inner lane for buses and moved economy ride-hail pickups to the consolidated LAX-it area. Soon, you’ll be able to take a train, bus, Lyft or Uber — or be dropped off by a friend — and zoom past traffic to your terminal on the People Mover.
Yet LAX authorities still plan to throw bad money after good. The roadway project proposes to build concrete walls and supports around the airport, making it all the more difficult for anything but a car to enter LAX.
Instead of a counterproductive roadway scheme, the airport should double-down on their multimodal successes. With expanded FlyAway service, you could take a frequent, comfortable bus from locations across the region and speed along transit-only lanes into LAX. With a safe and direct network of paths, you could walk or bike to your job at LAX, instead of navigating through a spaghetti bowl of roadway ramps. And with proper regulations and curb management, you could even take a shared autonomous vehicle to your terminal.
Decades of research and experience prove that adding more lanes doesn’t fix traffic. Though the People Mover will offer an alternative to traffic in the horseshoe, the only way to end it is congestion pricing. A dynamic toll — set just high enough to keep cars free-flowing and with provisions for disability access — could finally ease gridlock at LAX. Plus, it could earn money for the city’s beleaguered budget, offsetting its billions in costs. The transponder infrastructure to collect tolls is already in place today. With the free-to-use People Mover soon to open, now is the time to consider pricing the existing roads at LAX — not tearing them up and fruitlessly enlarging them right as the world comes to our doorstep.
The “LAX-pressway” is the last thing our airport needs. With the LAX board’s approval, only intervention from officials like Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Traci Park now can pump the brakes on this project.
Jacob Wasserman is a research project manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and a planning commissioner in the City of Santa Monica.
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